Tough sex offender laws easy to pass

As a councilor in the small Massachusetts city of Marlborough, Levy proposed an ordinance to bar dangerous sex offenders from living within 2,500 feet of a host of places where children gather.

LAUREN FITZPATRICK

As if he were still 9 years old, Steven Levy recalls the kidnapping and brutal sexual assault of a childhood friend who was left for dead.

"Fortunately, he did survive," Levy said, "but clearly it impacted me and the world that I lived in. I'm going to do anything I can to make sure we protect children."

As a councilor in the small Massachusetts city of Marlborough, Levy proposed an ordinance to bar dangerous sex offenders from living within 2,500 feet of a host of places where children gather. If passed, it would have limited sex offenders to about 5 percent of the city, mostly along highways and wetlands.

Levy had to settle for a 1,000-foot loop around parks, schools, day-care centers and homes for the elderly and mentally retarded, a compromise that skipped his own street. But he wanted Marlborough on the growing list of municipalities and states to act in the name of keeping children safe, even if it means outdoing neighbors and banishing registered sex offenders from their borders.

"It keeps them away from temptation," Levy said of offenders. "Yes, they have to live somewhere, but they don't need to be living near a playground where children congregate where they have the opportunity to interact."

Fearing they will become the "somewhere," Marlborough's neighbors now are lining up to take a stab at keeping offenders out, scared if they don't, they could become a haven for predators.

Squeaky wheel

Carol Willoughby, a home day-care provider in bordering Southborough, has written letters and spoken out at meetings -- happy to play the squeaky wheel. She's afraid another sex offender will move on to her block as one did in 2005, scaring away her clients.

"I just jumped on the bandwagon, and I said, 'Steven (Levy)'s doing it, why not in Southborough?' There's many day cares here, many children here, and there are offenders here," she said. "To have sex offenders living next door, even though they say with the statistics they don't offend near their home, you don't want to take that chance. I wouldn't want to take that chance. And I know parents don't want to take that chance."

Neither do elected officials, scared they'll be tagged as soft on dangerous perverts.

"The biggest thing is they're politically easy," law professor Corey Rayburn Yung said of the offenders. "Until very recently, (laws) were automatically passed without any debate. They allow you to be hard on crime on the least defensible groups of society, even though sex offenders, as a population, are very diverse."

Yung, who teaches at John Marshall Law School in Chicago and blogs about sex crimes, said standing up against the laws exposes politicians to opponents who accuse them of being soft on those who would hurt innocent children.

"I think a lot of the laws were drafted early on without much thought," he said. "They were painted with broad brushes by political winners and often driven by particularly sensational crime."

But the laws vary so much in severity and can be so absurd, Yung said.

In Louisiana, for example, public urination and prostitution are sex crimes that land the offender on the registry for at least 10 years.

All Missouri's offenders register for life, whether they brutally raped a child, got caught with child porn or had sex with a teenager while teens themselves.

State challenges

Legislators are beginning to challenge the laws. In Kansas, debates raged for months as lawmakers considered Iowa, where dangerous offenders dropped off the registry rather than conform to strict 2,000-foot laws. Some 400 offenders in Iowa couldn't be tracked in 2006, compared with 140 a year before.

Lawmakers in Kansas and Colorado eventually shot down efforts to draw such circles around schools and other places where children gather. Kansas even passed a law preventing municipalities from passing local ordinances. Iowa and Georgia have considered repealing their own strict residence laws.

"They've started to wonder if it's a good idea," Yung said. "The debate's a little bit healthier these days. But if a politician wants to make it their issue, the public still overwhelmingly supports these laws."

That's because legislators are setting policy out of fear, said Corwin Ritchie, head of the Iowa prosecutors' association, which in 2006 called for the repeal of the 2,000-foot residence ban.

"We still haven't convinced our own legislature of our position, and that's because it is so subject to politics," Ritchie said. "Every politician in the state is afraid of being painted into a corner that they're soft on sex offenders.

"When you have an election coming, everyone's fearful of that postcard coming in the mail a week before the election ... 'Rep. X voted against the strongest child safety measure ever enacted.' "

Cognizant of laws named for terrible child molestation cases -- such as Megan's Law, named for a New Jersey girl raped and killed by a convicted offender -- the public still fears children will be snatched from safety and abused or worse. Department of Justice statistics show, however, such stranger-danger cases are rare, with some 80 percent to 90 percent of children abused by someone they know.

"I do think it's banishment," she said. "I don't think that's legal. I also think if this is the issue it was painted to be, then it's an issue with the federal courts and not local municipalities. If these people are so extremely dangerous, they shouldn't be let out of prison."

Pope also said she didn't know how the city could afford to enforce the ordinance that squeaked by with a 6-5 vote. So she stood up and said so.

"Originally, people said this is political suicide," she said. "Anybody that opposes it, it's easier just to sit in the room, raise your hand and keep your mouth shut, which some of our councilors did initially."

But Pope, who has held a council seat for 10 years, isn't afraid of losing next time around because, she said, even when the debate got sticky, she didn't waffle.

"In the very beginning I said what I felt," she said, "and love me or hate me, you know how I stand."